082603 San Bernandino | Tom Moody | Siegfried Holzbauer | HTML Drawings
San Bernandino
After a few day's camping in Death Valley the distributor in my pickup went wobbly. We drove to Las Vegas in search of a new part, parked overnight in a casino parking lot, and found the next morning that the part for my truck couldn't be found any closer than San Bernadino. We took our time that day driving there, coming into town in the early evening towards the filthiest air I have seen in my entire live, before or since. We found a cheap hotel, took showers, and turned on the TV later to find that Ronald Reagan had been shot that day.
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Pretty nice: Tom Moody writes about and quotes an HTML drawing:
"Post-painterly abstraction" was Clement Greenberg's term for a kind of self-referential art that, by the 1960s, was becoming increasingly less rooted in the physical world of art-making materials. The then-new polymer paints made possible a kind of uninflected visual experience: color experienced as pure presence. The minimalists took this logic further than Greenberg was willing to go with an emphasis on found materials and processes: e.g., Dan Flavin's colored light bulbs. Extend the logic even more and art would be a series of Sol Lewitt-like commands to a piece of hardware such as a computer monitor, telling it to beam certain colors in certain configurations directly to a remote viewer's eyes.
And that's what Christopher (or Chris) Ashley is doing with his "html drawings," it seems to me: these aren't jpegs that can be right-clicked and saved but a series of instructions to your browser, telling it to draw tables in particular shapes and fill them in with hexadecimal colors...
I like Tom's take on my work. I owe him an email and a response on this weblog, but at the moment... time... need... too... much... must... go...
Later: apparently, the very very few times I have suggested that IE might be a better browser for a few HTML drawings has taken off in a direction of discussion of which I don't really feel a part. I mean, I could get all worked up about it, but as far as my drawings go it's not a concern. I use simple HTML so that my drawings display the same in all browsers as much as I can control. As for color display and all that I can't even think or worry about it. As I can recall, on the Asian Influence in Drawing series and the Hippie Dreams drawings used IE-specific table attributes. Since then I've stayed away from those tags. While I do use IE a lot, I also use Opera almost exclusively at home, and am using Mozilla more and more. Defending or critiquing IE is a non-issue for me (unless we really want to talk about consumer domination and monopolies, MS, and Gates), but a couple of exceptions aren't a big deal.
Here's an excerpt from an email I wrote to Tom:
I found your take of computer drawing as an extension
of Greenbergs ideas fascinating, and I accept it as a
valid take. I'll write again soon and tell you a
little more of the why and how- I could try really
hard and get all theoretical about it, but the origins
of the work are really based in recording memory,
story, place, nature, color and space, the need to
have a regular art practice during a time when a
studio practice is difficult to maintain, my interest
(commitment? belief? desire?) in abstract painting (a
kind of romantic minimalism, I guess). I've learned
over three year's time the potential of the weblog as
a personal work space, a time-based portfolio, that is
a place of production, exhibition, and archiving,
being both an individual space and a node on a
network(s). I've learned to push up against the
extreme limitations of HTML (no style sheets, nothing
fancy at all, made in Dreamweaver) to keep finding
imagery for a variety of intentions.
BTW, only a couple of series have used IE-specific
table attributions, and I feel controlling about those
because viewed in other browsers the meaning changes
seriously; what happens is that the the 3D-like
beveled table edges show and create an illustionistic
structured space that I don't want to use- it's like
how a frame can change how a painting is read. I want
the space to come from the rectangles and colors in
the drawings, not by border attributes. In a couple
of series I made screen shots and loaded a gif in the
page, but this goes against my wanting the page to
carry the image in it in the code, that no external
files are needed to make the image. As much as I
liked the flexibility some non-standard table
attributes provided, my preference for tables that can
be read by all browsers has made me stick with
standard, straight forward HTML, and to find a lot of
freedom within those extreme limitations. Some things
I've just had to accept and have become part of my
drawing language- for example, while I can make column
widths as narrow as 1 pixel, row heights can only be
reduced down to around 14 pixels because rows are made
to carry text. That's just the way it is, and I've
learned to use it.
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Siegfried Holzbauer writes in an email today:
"Ex voto" is a votive picture. This is a religious custom, when you do a pilgrimage to a powerful chapel or church and pray for
something, and it comes true, you give such a votive picture. It
depicts the fullfilled wish in a symbolic way mostly, e.g. a heart,
when you got healed from a heart disease.
See this series at [http://www.advancedpoetx.com/exvoto1.html].
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When I do a drawing with the "weaving line" thing, as above, it's a little too easy for it to start looking like something by Peter Halley, but my imagery is intended to be quite open, could be taken in some ways as being actually pretty conservative, and doesn't share any of Halley's concerns beyond being one of many possible readings:
Halley at Waddington, 1999: The elements of his iconography are rectangular cell units, linked by linear conduits, which represent the individual organisms and networks of contemporary urban existence. The paintings are depictions of the social landscape, of isolation and connectivity, and this sociological theme extends to his work in other media.
The cell was originally conceived as a prison, as a critique or parody of idealist, formalist modernism. But the idea of the cell particularly appeals to Halley because its meanings range from the concrete, such as a room, to its virtual application in cellular telephones and computers. In his current work, the simple diagrammatic structure is repeated on two-panel paintings, which in this exhibition are integrated with circuit-like wall drawings. Recent installations combine these with flow charts and wall works derived from digitally manipulated and cartoon imagery which explore social systems, hierarchies and apocalyptic narratives such as the Exploding Cell series.
Once I recognize a drawing is veering toward someone else's my tendency is to change the drawing. But I know that this is just today's drawing, that I'll do others, that my intention and the result are quite different, and the proof is in the series and body of work, not in a single image. Also, is it really such a bad thing to look like someone else's work? Originality as an intention can be a misguided strategy with dead ends and short lifespans, whereas a real path comes about by trial and error, imitation and stealing, repetition and culling.
Even though the drawings are infinitely reproducible they are still handcrafted. My interest in the body of work is still linked to the idea of the artist having a craft and being a kind of cottage industry, that there is meaning in that production context. When a drawing is reproduced out of context, out of my weblog and apart from its related drawing, the meaning changes, which I can't control.
I am asked occasionally how could HTML drawing be satisfying in a way that traditional drawing is, and I answer that it's really no different, just a different medium with a different process, but there is still a kind of mental and handiwork required, it's still a process, which for me is very collage-like: build it up, tear it down, change the dimensions, add a row or column, copy this chunk and move it over there. It's still a very physical process. Without that I would've lost interest long ago. And I think the the extreme limitations have challenged me in a way that, say, just using Photoshop, which mimics all to well existing media, almost on a silver platter, does not.
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Linked from Arts Journal, 08/25/2003 (no permalink on the day of post?):
The "Distributed" Library An experiment in the San Francisco area tries to create a virtual "distributed" library. "List the books and videos that you own. You will then have access to the multitude of books and videos available in other people's collections. You can search for specific authors or titles, browse individual collections, find nearby users, or find people who like books in common with yours. You will have access to user-written reviews and have the opportunity to write your own. If the owner of a book or video you're interested in has time for you to pick it up, you can check out items for a 2, 7, 14, or 30 day period (at the owner's discretion). Returning books late will get you negative feedback, while returning books promptly will get you positive feedback."
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I slightly revised yesterday's drawing today, which is something I don't do except when I discover a code error. The drawing just needed a slight tweak to be a little more itself than it was.
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